it was never merely chalk or cheese...

Especially in the incandescent decade of 1900–1910, he wrote everywhere and anywhere—and about anything: “The Advantages of Having One Leg,” “A Piece of Chalk,” “What I Found in My Pocket,” “On Gargoyles,” “Cheese.” These 1,000-word bijoux he would scribble in cabs, public houses, upon shirt cuffs, the backs of play bills.

It was never merely chalk or cheese, though. In Chesterton’s hands, even the most pedestrian subject grew wings. “There is,” Chesterton assured readers at the beginning of an essay on Kipling, “no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject.” In “The Unthinkable Theory of Professor Green,” an astronomer delivers a lecture on his exciting discovery of a new planet. Only gradually do we realize that this marvelous new world with all its wonders is what we’ve already seen but somehow never known: Earth. What Chesterton called the “mere excitement of existence” countermanded boredom. “It is dull as ditch-water,” you say. But think about it: “Is ditch-water dull? Naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun.”

G.K. Chesteron: master of rejuvenation